I run a forum – car related. I’m the admin and a moderator. These aren’t “cyber-attacks” they are “forum spammers”.
They get paid for every post they put up in forums.
some sneak in – come in trying to look like regular members, posting things ALMOST related tot he forum topics and try to look half-way legit, then suddenly start posting spam. Or, where allowed, go back and edit all their prior posts putting links in them.
Others come in and join and start posting spam immediately.
Forum spammers. COMMON every where – even support forums like McAfee, Symantec, etc have to deal with them. moderators or volunteers help a lot. Our forum has “report post” buttons that send email to the moderators (and me) and the person who clicks the report link can put in a comment such as “more spam” etc.
There are a lot of articles on the topic – and the outfit we buy our forum software from has some good measures in the software, and good suggestions to help reduce this issue (can’t be fully removed, but can be reduced)
For our forum, it’s requires a human to input characters, and to respond to an email to verify the membership. New members have limited rights. I’ve also put anti-spam measures in place like only so many private messages can be sent to members in a 5 minute period. Members can only post so many messages in a 60 second time period, etc.
Our members are great at pulling the “report post” trigger and use it pretty much only to report spam – and it goes to 5 of us, one of which is usually around to deal with it. We can then block the person by suspending them and blocking IP addresses or ranges. IF we suspend them, they can’t sign up again with the same email address, they have to get a new one (simple today with gmail, yahoo, etc.)
We’re at http://theamcforum.com/forum
Try posting spam and see how long it lasts…. 